Many operators install detailed metering into their data centre in order to try and understand energy and cost. This is expensive and fails to deliver the understanding of why the data centre performs as it does.
Known tools and ‘calculators’ assess only small parts of the data centre, either single components or small functional groups. These tools are ineffective as they fail to recognise that the data centre mechanical and electrical plant, IT equipment, management systems and applied IT workloads via software represent an interdependent system. Existing tools fail to span the full domain of Mechanical plant, Electrical plant, IT equipment, Software and User load and the variables involved in each of these areas.
These variables frequently exhibit correlation which can substantially compromise the output of tools with such a constrained functional domain. For example, user workloads tend to be lower in a corporate data centre when it is colder outside at night, meaning that an economised chiller system is likely to receive less load at the point where it is most efficient and more load at the point where it is least efficient. A degree day type component analysis is severely compromised in this instance.
This range of internal and external variables which impact the system rapidly exceeds the scope of manual analysis as the complex interactions and multiple factors in each step drive analysis errors.
It has been identified by many parties including the BCS Data Centre Specialist Group (DCSG) that a major obstruction to lower energy options within the data centre market is the lack of both effective energy use evaluation techniques and the ability to relate these to financial impacts in an effective and trustworthy fashion. This is compounded by a lack of trust in vendor environmental claims that are broadly assumed to be ‘greenwash’ in the absence of any independent arbiter or evaluation mechanism.